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Bulk Processing Limits

TubeBuddy offers many "Bulk Process" tools that can make updates to hundreds or even thousands of videos at a time.

Please keep in mind that this process updates 1 video at a time and that there are potential issues and limitations you might run into.

Because each video is processed 1 at a time, if YouTube's servers are down for a second or if your Internet goes out temporarily it can cause certain videos to fail.

In some cases, like with Bulk Thumbnail Overlays, the process only works with Public and Unlisted videos (not Private videos)

If you select more than 500 videos, it can be slow to load. We need to retrieve information for all videos that you select and then render those videos on the page. That means thousands and thousands of videos on screen which is very memory-intense and can use up your browser's resources. It also entails calling the YouTube API thousands of times to retrieve data.

Each video is processed one at a time and making updates can take anywhere from 1-3 seconds per video. That means if you are updating 1,000 videos, it can take 3,000 seconds ~ 50 minutes. Unfortunately there is no way around this and in fact, it could be against YouTube's TOS if we try to go faster than that. Still - updating 1,000 videos by hand could take 2 months so 50 minutes is better than 2 months :)

Notes

We recommend processing a maximum of 1,500 videos at a time. If you need to update 10,000 videos, you should run the process !7 times doing 1,500 each time. To do this, you could separate them into playlists and run each playlist separately. We hope to some day offer an option for bulk updates over 5,000 videos that will process 50 at a time which means you won't need for the initial sync to finish (before you select which videos to copy to).

We provide a list of video ids that failed so that you can re-run them if you want at a later time.

One possibility is to move some of the bulk processing to our servers rather than running in on your computers. This would potentially allow an unlimited number of updates. However, Cards/Annotations/End Screens can only be updated on the browser (not our server) so it wouldn't work with those tools. It could work with Bulk Find / Replace / Append and Bulk Thumbnail Updates.

If you have ideas or problems or any general feedback on the process, please let us know. We want to make sure it works for everyone - even those with more than 2k videos.